Irina Petrushova
| Irina Petrushova | |
|---|---|
| Born | 1965 near Nizhny Novgorod |
| Nationality | Russian |
| Occupation | journalist |
| Organization | Respublika |
| Awards | CPJ International Press Freedom Award (2002) |
Irina Petrushova (born 1965) is a Russian journalist, founder and editor-in-chief of the weekly Respublika in Kazakhstan. After a series of stories exposing government corruption, her life was threatened and her paper firebombed. In 2002, she was awarded a CPJ International Press Freedom Award.
Petrushova was born near Nizhny Novgorod in 1965. She is the daughter of Albert Petrushov, a reporter for the Russian Communist Party newspaper Pravda. Petrushov was known for his exposés of government corruption in Kazakhstan, including a story which ended the career of Kazakh Politburo member Dinmukhamed A. Kunayev.
In the early 1980s, Petrushova joined a journalism program at St. Petersburg State University that would allow her to work with her father. She later stated that traveling the country with him and seeing the impact that media attention could have on life in remote villages "made me positive that this is the thing I should do with my life."
Petrushova married a psychologist in 1984. The couple have two sons.
In 1992, Petrushova's father suffered serious brain damage when he was struck, apparently deliberately, by a car. His manuscript for a book on Kunayev was stolen while he was unconscious.
Founded in 2000, Petrushova's weekly Respublika focused on covering business and economic issues in Kazakhstan, and frequently published stories highly critical of president Nursultan Nazarbayev's regime. The paper wrote about financial scandals and rampant nepotism and cronyism. Scandals exposed the paper included the granting of oil rights to one of Nazarbayev's relatives; the disappearance of funds for an airport in the capital, Almaty; and the Kazakh police forcing tourists off a plane so that Nazarbayev's daughter might fly alone.Respublika's most notable story was an exposé which revealed that Nazarbayev had stashed US$1 billion of the state's oil revenues in a Swiss bank account; the government stated that this had been an emergency fund used to rescue the national economy in 1998.
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